


Bad Nights and Bourbon

by Anonymississippi



Series: Coping Mechanisms [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Cesarean Section, F/F, Major Character Death but that was literally the prompt, child birth, i'm sorry i had to do it to 'em, major sadness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:41:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21880375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: Cat returns in a rush from the east coast, arriving just in time for the birth of her and Kara's child.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Cat Grant
Series: Coping Mechanisms [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576228
Comments: 10
Kudos: 50
Collections: Super Santa Femslash 2019





	Bad Nights and Bourbon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SlytherinWarriorSlayer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SlytherinWarriorSlayer/gifts).



> Hi there, Slytherinwarriorslayer! Merry-happy-secret-santa! I got two prompts that were on wildly opposite ends of the spectrum, and I primarily write for season one ships, so I hope this semi-continuation of a fic I wrote for another Secret Santa a few years back will suffice. Maybe go read that one first and this will make more sense? 
> 
> Any way, happy holidays to all, I hope everyone has a great? Sad? bad? time reading this!
> 
> Prompt: Person A dies. Person B is with her.

“NNNNGGGGHHHAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!”

Cat feels the sound waves bounce off of the cold, sterile walls of the DEO hallways as her heels click-clack over the concrete floor. She’d pushed her driver to the limits of legality in the Bentley, shouting to go faster, to turn on the flashers, threatening to call in a police escort if he didn’t put his damn foot down and press the pedal to the floor. But she made it—God, just in time—to a nondescript skyscaper in the middle of National City that was the agreed-upon place for delivery, no matter how hard she fought against it. There’s women in suits and men in black and people in line for an elevator but she doesn’t care—she’d shoved them all out of the way and hit a button for the eighteenth floor. Finally on the right level, she turned corners blindly, pushing past muscle-men with phasers, heading straight for the noise, straight for the pain and blood and anxiety laid out on an overused mattress in a hyper-sterile med-bay.

“Ms. Grant—Ms. Grant!”

Cat doesn’t stop.

“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHEEEEGGGGGHHHH!”

It hurts.

Cat knows it hurts like hell. She’d been too thin, the doctors said, so it was anesthesia and a knife to the belly and two squalling, flailing hills of flesh emerging from behind a blue curtain at her waist. Never mind that she didn’t get to hear Adam’s cries, because she’d gone cold and blue and needed nearly three pints of blood to replace what she’d lost. Coherence hadn’t been at the top of the doctor’s list at that time. And never mind that Carter’s father hadn’t been with her when he was born, nor her own mother, because he was in negotiations and she was on a press tour and somehow Cat didn’t see the need to pull either of them away from their other duties.

But this was different. This wasn’t her strong-willed climb to the top, having it all on her own. This was Kara, and she mattered. Kara needed her, or so she’d like to think. But most of all…

She needed Kara.

Cat might’ve been late, but like hell was she missing this.

Her daughter, and Kara.

Kara was having _their_ daughter.

“Ms. Grant, you need to—”

“Shove it, soldier,” Cat snapped, whipping round the corner as Susan tried to hold her back. “I pissed off Bezos to get my jet to the front of the Tarmac so I’d be here in time. You aren’t stopping me.”

“Ms. Grant,” Susan said somberly, bowing up to her impressive height in the hallway, extending her hands toward either side so that Cat had no choice but to stop. “You need to prepare yourself.”

“Prepare myself for _what_?!” Cat shouted.

“Kara, Ms. Grant,” Susan whispered, her eyes flickering around the hallway when she mentioned Supergirl’s real name. “She’s not doing well.”

Tears surged and her jaw twitched, but Cat pressed forward.

Like hell.

Like _hell_ , Supergirl, do you get to do this.

Like hell was Kara-sunshine-Danvers going to go through labor without looking like a fucking sun-ripened peach, all glowing and fuzzy and glistening, instead of sallow and sweating and corpse-like. She was Kara— _her Kara_ —and she’d promised Cat from the beginning, four months ago in her kitchen at Thanksgiving that they were going to do this together.

_She promised._

Kara was not the type to go back on her word. Better still, Cat wasn’t the type of person to let her.

“Kara,” Cat called, as the sliding doors _whooshed_ open and the screams and beeps and frantic mutterings grew louder. She was overwhelmed by the strong smell of iron and sterile sanitizers in a glass room that had been covered in too-thin, gauzy-like sheets—it was apparently all the federal government could afford for privacy, despite Cat’s desperate pleading to pay to take her to St. Dominick’s.

_Cat, you know we can’t do that. Kara’s condition is unlike anything most of the doctors there have ever seen before, and my mom and I—_

_\--are the only two doctors in the world who’ve worked with Kryptonians, I know, Agent Scully._

Meanwhile, the place looked like it was draped in burial shrouds.

Or worse.

Ghosts.

Cat had not been happy with Alex’s repetitious explanations of why Kara couldn’t go to a “real” hospital; then again, in the brief instance after she’d found out Kara was pregnant with her child, she’d not been terribly happy either. But there wasn’t much of a choice to the matter, as Cat was finding out through one road-block after another when it came to alien pre-natal care.

Like the pain-killers, for instance. And how, despite invulnerability under a yellow sun, Kara’s own body wasn’t creating any kind of a buffer for pain that came from a natural process.

Which explained the screaming.

It didn’t, however, explain the delusions.

“Mother?”

The scene before her was grave. Kara looked up at her aunt, pupils blown and unfocused, her head lolling and drool pooling at the corner of her lip. There was movement behind a blue curtain at her waist, and Director Henshaw, clad in black as if dressed for a funeral, stood sentinel, his strong grip on Kara’s right shoulder.

“Mother? Please…” Cat heard Kara’s raspy call, saw her desperately staring up into Astra’s eyes as she held her down.

“No, Little One,” Astra replied. “Not quite.”

“Mother,” Kara continued weakly, “it hurts.”

Cat watched as Astra bent to kiss her niece’s forehead, and the jolt it sent to her heart almost made her weak in the knees.

All of the pretests, the trials, the extra care on Alex’s and Eliza’s part—it didn’t explain Kara’s disorientation. Or the extra pain, despite her invulnerability. It didn’t explain the pallor, or the frightened looks, or the fluid covering Alex’s glove-clad hands, or why Astra and J’onn were holding Kara down by her shoulders as Alex stood there, frozen.

“What the _fuck_ is going on?!” Cat screamed, storming into the room.

“Cat, stop,” Susan was right behind her, grabbing her around the shoulders.

“Move, Alex.”

Kara’s mom—not her real mom, it was Alex’s mom—there was something small and green in her hand.

Pulsing, glowing, and sharp.

_No._

God no, _please_.

“What’s happening?!” Cat shouted, throwing her weight forward, feeling stronger arms (and a stronger body) pull her back as she thrashed, dropping her Kate Spade bag, her Dior glasses flying off the crown of her head, her Marc Jacobs heels kicking at ridiculous heights as she was restrained. She needed to be there, beside her, it was Kara, she was her child’s mother, she was Supergirl, she was Kara, and she was… she was…

“Alexandra, _move!_ ” Astra shouted from her position near Kara’s shivering shoulders.

Cat watched as Alex seemed to snap out of it, as Eliza and Alex both approached Kara’s abdomen with the scalpel, as they disappeared behind the curtain and Susan carefully maneuvered her shaking form forward.

Kara looked cold, but she always burned like a furnace to the touch. Those evenings in the hallway they spent preparing the nursery in the beach house were hotter than California deserts. Every brush of hands over dinner in the kitchen or every lingering hug they exchanged, every second Cat spent with her hand against Kara’s stomach… the heat from it all melted Cat’s cold exterior into goop around Kara, and their imperfect life, and the tiny harbor of insignificance they’d managed to dock in while Cat handed over Foundation development to her east-coast right hand… it all burned so brightly Cat couldn’t help but see stars when she pictured their life together.

She had made the decision to come back to California for the baby, and she didn’t regret it for a second. To be there—be _with_ —Kara. Even if they weren’t _together,_ together, she would be mother to that child, and co-parent with such efficiency and spectacle it would surpass the wildest dreams of National City celebs. But all of that would be for naught, if the superhuman shivering and sweaty on the table before her didn’t regain some coherence, if the knife meant to slice open her abdomen so much as made contact with their unborn daughter.

The challenges of a natural birth for a Kryptonian were already immense. Leave it to their motley crew to throw in a yellow sun and some human DNA to make it all the more volatile, risky, and awful. Add the uncertain element of Kryptonite—the only thing that could cut Kara’s skin in the event of an emergency—and its unknown harmful effects on their baby…

_Kara, please stop shivering._

“Kara—Kara, please—”

The sound of something wet and suctiony almost made her gag, but Cat couldn’t stop murmuring…

“Kara?”

But not her voice this time, because Astra was hovering over her niece’s face, her palms on either side of her cheeks.

“Kara, wait—wait, let me check her pupils—”

Alex was shedding blood-soaked gloves as she shuffled around the curtain, waving a pen light into her sister’s eyes.

“Susan, I swear to God—”

And suddenly she was free, and approaching, and sliding a little on something wet and clear on the floor, something pink that clotted around the edges of fraying, too-white towels, soaking up the liquid to turn it sickly, bubble-gum pink.

“What happened?” Cat muttered, wiping Kara’s sweaty hair from her face. Her gaze traveled from blank blue eyes that roved listlessly in their sockets toward the surrounding family’s faces. “Alex, what—”

“Blood pressure spiked,” Alex said, her red, blotchy eyes darting back and forth toward the monitors. “But we couldn’t push any meds because—it was pre-eclampsia, Cat, or as close as it comes for Kryptonians—”

“And you couldn’t have stopped this?!” Cat wailed, her fingernails digging into Kara’s shoulders, tears running hot over her cheeks. “Astra, why didn’t you—”

“There were no natural births on our planet, Catherine, you know this.”

“But she’s—she’s still—”

“We have to do an assessment.”

“Kara, no,” Cat said, placing a kiss to her brow. “Please, darling girl, come on—”

“Cat?”

Momentary recognition, and tired blue eyes met hers, before going cloudy and blank once more.

Astra intervened this time.

“Catherine, you have to step away, she could start—”

“Alex, the monitor,” J’onn said.

Cat was too busy watching Kara’s eyes roll back in her head to register the look of dread on their faces.

“Shit, Cat get back—”

Cat was flying across the room before she knew what happened. There was the crash of metal, something sharp against her bicep, cutting fabric, cutting skin, muscle, but superficially. There was blood, there was always blood, but it was such a little pain compared to the sight before her:

Kara, limbs flailing wildly, shaking violently, uncontrolled, her head bent back at an unnatural angle and her eyes shutting out the world around her. Astra and J’onn grabbed hold of a wrist or a knee or an ankle and held her down so hard the wheels of the hospital bed sunk into the slick linoleum.

“Breathe, goddammit!” Alex cried, abandoning her instruments and throwing herself toward Kara’s bedside.

Cat was underneath Astra’s arms and cradling Kara’s left side in an instant.

“Don’t you dare, Supergirl!” she threatened, wondering what leverage she had against God himself to make him leave her angel with her for a few years more. “This isn’t how it happens, Kara—Kara, _please_!!!”

It lasts longer than any of them can imagine—three interminable minutes of violent shaking and sobbing and Kara’s skin turning bluer and bluer until it matches the color of her suit in some places, along the pulsing in her carotid, and a throbbing vein in her forehead.

When her body finally relaxes, she is pale as the sheets beneath her.

“No, love… don’t you dare.”

“Kara,” Alex whispers, “Kara come on, please—”

“Alex,” Cat hears J’onn murmur. “You need to let her go.”

“It’s not supposed to be like this…it’s not… this isn’t… Alex, Alex, _do something_.”

“Catherine.”

Astra’s voice, from far away.

“Catherine, you have to release her.”

“Alex, you have to step back—”

“Cat—”

“Astra—”

“Alexandra—”

“Kara, Kara no—”

“Cat?”

“Kara…”

“Kara?!”

“Kara—Kara! Kara, please… Kara?”

They fell silent as the grave as Astra gently shut Kara's eyelids. Suddenly, like glass shattering in the distance, Cat heard her baby crying from behind the curtain.

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a chapter two in the works yall... just fyi.


End file.
